I just found a pretty cool idea in the world of captchas- those necessary evil things that force you to think when all you want is the sweet sweet porn. reCAPTCHA basically takes the time spent deciphering and entering captchas and puts it to good use, namely helping to decode words that OCR (optical character recognition) has failed on. You are presented with two words to decode- one is a word that OCR choked trying to decode, the other is a ‘control’ word that the system knows the answer to. You just type in both quickly and hey presto, you get access to what you want and the world gets one more piece of a scanned book. They also give the same word to multiple people to confirm that it is what you say it is, so there is error trapping involved. I think this is a good way to get some kind of productive use out of all that time we spend entering stupid strings of text. They even make a WordPress plugin version… so…